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The Pulse: Here’s what’s important to voters in Toronto

Just a week before the words “crack cocaine” and “Mayor Rob Ford” became inseparable, city councillors had big issues on the agenda: Transit, affordable housing, jets over Toronto.

Those items can be found among the top priorities of Toronto’s voters ahead of an October election — but so does the mayor and councillors’ behaviour.

This is a young city that is agonizing over how best to expand: Is it light rail or subways (“subways, subways”). Are we waging a war on cars? Does our cycling grid help us get where we need to go?

But it is also a city still grappling with the reality of a crack-smoking mayor, of councillors who declare an entire area to be a “pedophile district,” and of shouting matches between adults on the council chamber floor.

Over 13 weeks, the Star spoke to residents in wards across the city, from Etobicoke to Scarborough, to create an informal tally of what matters most. It isn’t a scientific poll, but rather a temperature-taking.

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What we found is that nearly a third of 600 people surveyed put transit first. Also near the top was congestion and road repairs — the things that affect how we get around.

Those issues have dominated the debate in this municipal election, with top candidates sparring over the LRT vs. subway for Scarborough, how to build a downtown relief line and what to do with the Gardiner Expressway. That conversation spilled over into the provincial election this month with questions over expanding GO Transit service in the GTA and beyond.

Murtaza Haider, associate dean at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School and director of the institute of housing and mobility, said a lot is at stake in the transit debate.

“What is happening here is that you have a reasonably stable economy in Toronto . . . we don’t have crime, we don’t have other concerns that usually occupy the minds of voters in other large cities such as Chicago, New York,” said Haider (Only 10 Toronto voters said “guns and gangs” were there top priority and only five said “crime” in general).

“Obviously the voters’ minds . . . would focus on things you think are not working and that happens to be the mobility question.”

Haider said the good news is a lot of people in Toronto take transit, making it a priority for politicians. But that success also creates issues of congestion. And in the last few years, he said, there has been little done to fix it.

“We had a paralysis by analysis, that is, we studied everything to death,” he said.

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The second highest priority for voters was Mayor Rob Ford’s misbehaviour: The crack, the alleged drunk driving, the comments about his wife and a list of other allegations that have stacked up since as early as May 2013.

The comments on a recent Star story about Ford’s imminent return on June 30 paints the picture:

“He’s completely delusional.”

“I can’t wait for this city to be a Ford free zone.”

“Please just go away.”

It wasn’t always this way. In 2010, ahead of his win over George Smitherman, polls showed Ford leading in areas of public trust, of managing finances.

Andre Côté, manager of programs and research for the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, said thanks to Ford the overall profile of council has been increased. That also means councillor behaviour has been more actively on display.

But that engagement with the process — whether it was born from dissatisfaction with the mess at city hall — has a silver lining, Côté said.

“It’s created a huge opportunity. Interest has probably never been higher,” he said. “If there was a way to sort of channel that newfound interest in city hall . . . it could be a really positive thing for the city.”

The rest of voters’ concerns really boil down to the nitty-gritty — the money and time items that affect the day-to-day: Congestion, property taxes, infrastructure.

The good news is, there are still four months left to grill the mayoral candidates on how they will address each of them.

The numbers

We asked voters what their top priorities were for the upcoming election. Here is how the top ten answers ranked:

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